Yes, that’s true, but JavaScript has very few core APIs aside from basic DOM manipulation. Even things like comparing timezones requires a third party dependency, for example.

I wouldn’t say you need no dependencies in a Java project, but by all means check the average number of dependencies you get with Java or Python and compare it to almost any Node project.

You could probably sample projects on GitHub, look at the dependency graph, and compare.

At least part of it is that JavaScript is not really a batteries included language like Python or Java to even PHP.

You can’t really do anything productive without relying on a third party library.

The comparison is between today and ‘today but without the highway’, not between today and before the highway was built. If the population increase is greater with the highway there, that’s still part of the induced demand.

I wouldn’t suggest that highways never induce demand, but the idea that people are driving more in Boston because of the Big Dig seems doubtful to me.

A city being “bad for drivers” is not a great indicator of it not being car dependant. Cities in the Netherlands are probably the most walkable and bikable on the planet, and also great to drive in because there are hardly any cars.

The Netherland has pretty robust car infrastructure too.

And I agree; a city can be bikable, walkable, and drivable all at once. That should be the goal.

Do you think the total car traffic in the Boston area today is greater than it would have been had the Big Dig not been built? If yes, the ‘infrastructure naysayers’ were correct.

It’s probably gone down, actually, at least in per capita terms. Boston’s population is a lot bigger than it used to be, so that has to be taken into account.

Keep in mind, the Big Dig actually reduced the total number of highway ramps, which is part of why it increased traffic flow. And by reclaiming neighborhoods from elevated highways, it reconnected areas. You can easily walk places that were not possible before.

But they still deepen the overall car dependency. Investing in rail-bound transportation while imposing heavy fees on car traffic into the city would likely be a better use of resources.

Boston is far from car dependent; it’s probably one of the worst cities in America for drivers, and best for cyclists and pedestrians.

That’s surprising to me. I remember at the time, NBC Nightly News and PBS Newshour (my family’s news diet in the 90s) did stories about it, and they both definitely mentioned reclaiming city space as one of the benefits.

I think the Big Dig, while it ended up costing several times what it was supposed to, will go down in history as one of the best highway projects of its era. It also proved infrastructure naysayers wrong. A lot of people insist that any highway projects always just induce demand, resulting in even more congestion, but the Big Dig did nothing of the sort. To this day, 30 years on, Boston traffic is still not as bad as it was pre-Big Dig.

Are we going to magically assume the traffic just vanished?

It’s an underground highway. Out of sight, out of mind. I imagine they probably also improved the overall road design, like Seattle, Denver, and Boston have done (or are doing) with their projects to bury highways below-grade.

It’s a worldwide phenomena. The “Big Dig” is a great example of urban space reclaimed from above-grade highways.

Maybe you don’t care, but the OSI definition does.

In fairness, they didn’t release anything open at all.

Basically credit card theft.

Over twenty years ago, when I was pretty young and inexperienced, I answered a newspaper ad for IT/programming at a so-called “startup.” It sounded great.

My first day was in someone’s living room-turned office and I didn’t actually have any real idea what the business was. I was told it was a financial company, but it was taking off like gangbusters. Relatively quickly, within days actually, we moved into a very nice class-A office building. The owner was a remarkably charismatic man and being in his presence made you feel warm and understood and like you had a world of possibilities around you. I felt like a badass: I had a good-paying job, worked in a beautiful and prestigious office, and had a boss who made me feel great.

I found out, however, he was basically just running a scam. Between about 2-4am, he would have TV spots running, selling naive housewives, unemployment breadwinners, alcoholics, etc a “system” to earn huge sums of money very quickly. His system? You find people selling notes. You find people who want to buy notes. You introduce them and take a commission. A huuuuuuge commission.

Was that illegal? I don’t know. I kind of doubt the people in the ads were real, but my paychecks were clearing.

I learned that when his sales people (who worked late at night, when the infomercials ran) took orders, they would record everyone’s credit card info. Then, the owner directed us to automatically sign them up for things they didn’t ask for – recurring subscriptions to his membership-based “note marketplace” website. This was before the Internet was so mainstream, and many people buying this package didn’t even have a computer.

If people tried to place an order, and one credit card was declined, he’d just have them quietly try another card we had on file for them, without asking. If anyone complained, they’d obviously just refund the whole charge to avoid pissing off the credit card companies, but he was really just hoping no one would notice.

I quit pretty quickly and got a “real” real job.

That still does touch on the problem. The RCS group was formed in 2007. Let that sink in.

I think if you try to have regulators come up with standards for things like airdrop or location sharing, it’s going to be a bad time.

RCS you can just regulate as a telecom feature. It’s contained. It doesn’t touch things like finance (which vary by country).

I honestly get it. Apple has been excruciatingly stubborn to adopt RCS.

I think in the past this was excusable because RCS has been such a moving target. First it was the carriers disagreeing about how to implement, and dragging their feet, then Google got tired of waiting for carriers and sort of bypassed them. But even then RCS is messy when it’s part carrier, part Google, etc. Even Google Fi doesn’t support RCS if you want its text-from-computer function working! Then came e2e encryption, which has been haphazard.

At this point though, it is starting to solidify. Apple should implement it, and if Apple drags their feet, regulators should intervene. Don’t rule out that happening in the EU, either.

Is that site still around?

I actually think that you’re hitting on something that would be a good idea, but probably a redesign of Lemmy (or something new entirely).

Communities should work more like hashtags. If you “subscribe” to politics or technology or whatever, you should be able to get posts from across the fediverse with that label, instead of just what’s on your local instance. Then, you should be able to subscribe to moderation decisions like you can on Bluesky.

Combine those two things and you’ve made something powerful.

“Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app,” the Reddit worker said.

This reminds me of the “average user” Comcast would talk about when they introduced price discrimination metered billing. Just include the long tail of lurkers and signups who almost never use the service, and you can claim that the Apollo users (who are power users) are just outliers who should pay more.

Ultimately for me this is a reminder that when there’s a for-profit business ramping up to an IPO, it ultimately has to decide what the products are. Reddit tried to make itself the product with Reddit Gold, but clearly not enough people were paying for it, so it has to make users the product. It’s hard to “monetize” users through someone else’s app, so they’ve basically decided that for app users, if the developers figure out how to sell a very expensive service, more power to them, otherwise fuck 'em.